Böcker av Kawal Deep Kour

The Opium Factory of Ghazipur has a history all its own. Like most other colonial enterprises, it was developed to further colonial mercantile and imperial interests. Ghazipore, as it was known in British India, was the headquarters of the Benaras opium agency, which included almost the whole of the then-United Provinces. Directed and driven by metropolitan capital, the opium factory's success signaled the rise of colonial India as a major exporter of raw opium. Nevertheless, the opium factory was not simply a site of production of "provision" opium; it was where metropolitan capital and imperial science and technology intertwined to ensure the vitality of a colonial establishment. Technology was not everything, however. Raising the standard of opium manufacturing required the services of the "opium chemist," who became vital to the efficacy of the entire operation. Colonial research focused on the extraction of alkaloids to meet the growing demand of medicinal opium and its imports to England during and after World War II. From a site of manufacture of crude raw opium, the factory evolved into a modern pharmaceutical concern that was totally redesigned and reequipped. Renamed the "Government Opium and Alkaloid Works," some elements of continuity render this 200-year old monument a legacy embodying a powerful narrative of how "opium made the world go round." This work is an attempt to revisit and uncover the many trajectories of the Ghazipur opium factory, which still remains a site of production in the twenty-first century.

Opium Consumption and Experience in India offers a "cultural biography" of opium on the subcontinent. It spans the Raj and India after independence. The book examines the "social lives" of opium in India, beginning as a commodity in the sixteenth century, exploring its social transformation and singularization in the eighteenth century, and chronicling its decline from the mid-nineteenth century to obsolescence and the new "paths and diversions" of our own times. The book attempts to illuminate how opium came to occupy a central place in India's "cultures of consumption" and also in the socio-economic and political life of a people. How did opium become embedded in a social ethos where it not only served as a social lubricant but soon morphed into a narco-identity for the people of India? The identification of India as a land of "great opium eaters" spawned the propaganda of a "civilizing mission" that ushered in a new era of material exploitation and political domination. As Dr. Kour demonstrates, this had a significant impact on the development and regulation of opium and its use.